Archives of News Items

  1. [March 11, 2015] Here is our presentation to Duke Energy given at the Energy Center at Purdue. [ pptx ].
  2. [Aug 15, 2014] We are looking for two graduate research assistants, starting this Fall, for an NSF-funded and a Department of Energy-funded project. [ Announcement ] Update: These positions have been filled.
  3. [Aug 2014] I am teaching an exciting, practical computer systems course titled “Fault-tolerant Computer System Design” this Fall. Come and check it out. [ Course web page ]
  4. [June 2014] We have two proposals to the National Science Foundation accepted. The first is from the Computational Research Infrastructure (CRI) program and is titled “Computer System Failure Data Repository to Enable Data-Driven Dependability Research” (jointly with Carol Song of Purdue). The second is from the NeTS program and is titled “Tango: Performance and Fault Management in Cellular Networks through Device-Network Cooperation” (jointly with Alan Qi at Purdue, Mostafa Ammar at Georgia Tech, and Kaustubh Joshi and Rajesh Panta at AT&T Labs).
  5. [June 2014] Our paper to Supercomputing on parallelizing genome alignment is accepted. This is work done under our NSF XPS award from September 2013. The paper is here. [ pdf ] And the open source release is here. [ html ]
  6. [Feb 2014] We have papers accepted at PLDI (debugging hangs and performance slowdowns in parallel programs), DSN (zero-day SQL injection attack detection), and TPDS (performance debugging in large-scale programs, extension of our PACT 12 paper). All these papers are available from our group’s publications page. [ html ]
    • Update: We have released an open source implementation of our PLDI paper system. It also includes the implementation of our earlier PACT ’12 paper, integrated into one system, which we call AutomaDeD. The github repository is at: https://github.com/scalability-llnl/AutomaDeD
  7. [November 20, 2013] I am honored to be named an ACM Distinguished Scientist. ACM named 40 Distinguished Members this year. My citation reads “for laying the software basis for designing distributed systems that can tolerate faults under a variety of operating conditions.” The ACM news story can be found at the following URL. [ html ]
  8. [September 6, 2013] We are looking for a post-doctoral research associate with systems building skills in distributed systems. [ html ] This position has been filled.
  9. [August 2013] DCSL gets two new research awards – one from the National Science Foundation for making computational genomics applications scalable and the second from Northrop Grumman for making their distributed systems that are used for military mission planning secure. [ NSF grant ] [ Northrop Grumman grant ]
  10. [April 8, 2013] The powers-that-be (aka Board of Trustees) entrust me with the awesome responsibility of being a full professor. [ Purdue news story ] [ ECE news story ]
  11. [Dec 6, 2012] I have been selected as an IMPACT Faculty Fellow at Purdue for 2013-14. [ html ]
  12. [July 15, 2013] My “Writings” page gets a facelift with tales of two recent travels. [ html ]
  13. [June 2013] I am teaching a graduate level course (ECE 695/CS 590) titled “Fault-tolerant Computer System Design” in Fall 2013. Here is the flier for the course. [pdf] [ppt]
  14. [August 2012] I am teaching a graduate level course titled “Fault-tolerant Computer System Design” in Fall 2012. Here is the flier for the course. [pdf] [html]
  15. [June 2012] Our work on reliability with scientific applications from Lawrence Livermore National Lab get some press time. “Nuclear weapon simulations” is the headline grabbing moniker for the work, though we work with unclassified benchmark applications. [Purdue news story] [Campus newspaper news story]
  16. [February 6, 2012] The non-linear version of my bio gets an update. [html]
  17. [Mar 2012] Three papers of ours get into DSN this year.
  18. [February 6, 2012] We are hiring another post-doc for the Missile Defense Agency project with immediate availability. The skills needed are computer and communications modeling and distributed algorithms (systems-focused, not theory-focused). Due to the restriction from the sponsor, the position is only open to US citizens or permanent residents. See the posting for the details. [pdf] [html]
  19. [February 3, 2012] See the list of our recent papers that have been accepted in my CV. [html] [pdf]
  20. [November 2, 2011] Our paper in Sensys wins the best paper award. The paper is: Aveksha: A Hardware-Software Approach for Non-intrusive Tracing and Profiling of Wireless Embedded Systems by Matthew Tancreti, Mohammad Sajjad Hossain, Saurabh Bagchi, and Vijay Raghunathan. Here is the final version of the paper. [pdf] And here is the final presentation. [pdf]
  21. [September 2011] I am spending my sabbatical at IBM Research in Austin working in the Future Systems Department on an exciting new project on the intersection of mobile computing and IBM’s cloud offerings. Time to make an honest living! [IBM Austin Research Lab]
  22. [July 2011] DCSL-ers have been having a wonderful time getting papers accepted at top conferences – Sensys (Matt), Securecomm (2 – one from Gaspar and Jevin and the other from Amiya), SRDS (Fahad), and Supercomputing (Ignacio). See my CV for the detailed citations. (html)
  23. [June 2011] My writings and picture album pages have gotten an update. [Writings] [Album]
  24. [June 2011] I will be headed to DSN in Hong Kong June 26-30. There I am organizing a panel with the ambitious title of “10 grand challenges in dependability for the next decade”. It will be on June 29 with an exciting set of 5 speakers, drawn from both industry and academia. See the links to the position statements in the DSN program. [DSN program]
  25. [May 2011]I visited IBM Research in Austin and gave a presentation on our work on debugging software bugs in large-scale systems. The presentation is available from the presentations page of our research group. [html]
  26. [April 2011] New post-doctoral position opening in DCSL for a DoD project. If you are a PhD graduate in Computer Science or Computer Engineering, have a strong research record in computer modeling and cyber security, are a US citizen or a permanent resident, take a look. [Announcement in pdf] [Announcement in html]
  27. [November 2010] I have been appointed an Assistant Director of CERIAS, the university’s security research and education center. I will be one of 4 Assistant Directors. You can find information about CERIAS at the following URL. [html]
  28. [August 2010] We have been awarded a 3 year project by the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) of the Department of Defense titled “Agent-based Enhanced C2BMC Architecture”. C2BMC stands for Command and Control, Battle Management, and Communications. The project is aimed at developing architectures for command and control of missile defense systems as part of the Enhanced C2BMC Program of MDA. It involves Dan DeLaurentis of Aeronautics and Astronautics Engineering at Purdue as the PI and me as the co-PI. Here is a news story that Purdue has just done on our grant. [Story from Purdue] [Story in Purdue Exponent, the campus newspaper] 4.     [June 2010] Our work on debugging of large-scale parallel programs for nuclear weapon simulation, done with colleagues at Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL), is in the news. [Story 1 (from Purdue)] [Story 2 (ACM Tech News)] [Story 3 (HPC Wire)] …
  29. 5.     [April 2010] I have been awarded the Eta Kappa Nu (HKN) “Outstanding Professor Award” for 2010. The award was presented at the Spring Banquet and is given to one faculty member from ECE.
  30. 3.     [November 2010] I will be teaching an experimental graduate-level course in Spring 2011, titled “Fault-Tolerant Computer System Design”. This is a project-based course in which students do a semester-long project, which in the past has often led to publications. You can find details of the course from the following URL, which is from my last offering of the course. The class will meet M W F 4.30-5.20. [html]
  1. [February 28, 2010] Our paper on automatic error detection in large-scale parallel programs, done with colleagues at Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL) is accepted to appear at DSN (Dependable Systems and Networks), to be held June 28-July 1, 2010.
  • Greg Bronevetsky, Ignacio Laguna, Saurabh Bagchi, Bronis de Supinski, Dong H. Ahn, and Martin Schulz, “AutomaDeD: Automata-Based Debugging for Dissimilar Parallel Tasks”.
  1. [October 31, 2009] I am participating in the NSF NEES project as a Purdue co-PI. This is the largest grant ever won at Purdue. The National Science Foundation created the George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) to improve our understanding of earthquakes and their effects. NEES is a shared national network of 14 experimental facilities, collaborative tools, a centralized data repository, and earthquake simulation software. Together, these resources provide the means for collaboration and discovery in the form of more advanced research based on experimentation and computational simulations of the ways buildings, bridges, utility systems, coastal regions, and geomaterials perform during seismic events.

Purdue will be running the operations of NEES for 2009-2014. My role in this is the cybersecurity officer responsible for the security of NEES assets at NEEScomm (the headquarters, here at Purdue) as well as at the 14 sites through the US. You can find the press release upon the announcement of the NEES award and the announcement of the NEES team at the following URLs:

http://www.purdue.edu/UNS/x/2009b/090910RamirezNEES.html

“https://www.nees.org/about/neescomm/team/

  1. [August 11, 2009] We are looking for two PhD students to join our lab as Research Assistants. [html]

[Oct 1, 09] These positions have been filled.

  1. [July 2, 2009] I have been selected to be the Program Committee Chair for DSN, our premier conference, for its 2011 edition, which will be held in Hong Kong in June 2010.

. 10.            [July 2009] Our papers have been accepted in Sensys, Supercomputing (nominated as a candidate for best student paper), Middleware, and MASS. Hey, this feels pretty good for all of us here.

  1. [May 19, 2009] I have been awarded the Teaching for Tomorrow award by Purdue University . This makes me one of ten “junior” faculty throughout the campus, matched with two highly experienced faculty who, over the next year, will address important topics and issues related to teaching and student learning. It is based on current and potential excellence in undergraduate education.
  2. [May 1, 2009] I have updated the picture album. [html]
  3. [April 30, 2009] I have become a Senior Member of ACM and a Full Member of the Sigma Xi research society.
  4. December 22, 2008: Two of our papers have been accepted for Infocom ‘09. The acceptance rate was 282/1435 = 19.7%.
  5. “Hermes: Fast and Energy Efficient Incremental Code Updates for Wireless Sensor Networks,” Rajesh Krishna Panta and Saurabh Bagchi. [pdf]
  6. “Covert TCP/IP Timing Channels: Theory to Implementation,” Sarah Sellke, Chih-Chun Wang, Saurabh Bagchi, and Ness Shroff. [pdf]
  7. December 2008: I will be teaching a new graduate level course in Spring 09 – ECE 695B titled “Design of Fault Tolerant Computer Systems”. This course updates a previous course ECE 572 that I last taught in Spring 07. ECE 695B meets Tue and Thu 1.30-2.45 in EE 115. You can find the syllabus at the course web page here [html].
  8. November 26, 2008: I will be organizing a workshop on intrusion-tolerant systems called WRAITS, to be held with DSN 09 in Lisbon, Portugal on Jun 29-Jul 2, 2009. My co-organizers are Miguel Correia (U. of Lisbon) and Partha Pal (BBN Technologies). The workshop is called “Recent Advances on Intrusion-Tolerant Systems”. Here is the web site of the previous conferences. [html]
  9. November 11, 2008: Our patent filed with Avaya colleagues titled “Stateful and cross-protocol intrusion detection for voice over IP” has been approved. It was filed on September 30, 2004. Here is the patent on the USPTO site. [html]
  10. November 9, 2008: Our long-delayed paper detailing in a comprehensive way our work on intrusion detection in Voice-over-IP environments has been accepted for publication in the Elsevier International Journal of Information Security.
  11. “Intrusion Detection in Voice-over-IP Environments,” Yu-Sung Wu, Vinita Apte, Saurabh Bagchi, Sachin Garg, and Navjot Singh. [pdf]
  12. June, 2008: A slew of our papers are accepted at competitive conferences. Here is the lowdown on the latest contributions from our research group:
  1. YuSung Wu, Gaspar Modelo-Howard, Bingrui Foo, Saurabh Bagchi, and Gene Spafford, “The Search for Efficiency in Automated Intrusion Response for Distributed Applications,” Accepted to appear at the 27th International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS), Naples, Italy, October 6-8, 2008. (Acceptance rate: 28/112 = 25%)

This paper tackles the problem of optimal responses to pick when an intrusion is detected in a distributed system. We show that optimality is NP-hard and present an approximate algorithm based on genetic algorithm to pick the best responses.

  1. Vinai Sundaram, Saurabh Bagchi, Yung-Hsiang Lu, and Zhiyuan Li, “SeNDORComm: An Energy-Efficient Priority-Driven Communication Layer for Reliable Wireless Sensor Networks,” Accepted to appear at the 27th International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS), Naples, Italy, October 6-8, 2008. (Acceptance rate: 28/112 = 25%)

This paper presents the design of a communication layer for wireless sensor networks that can handle different priorities for different messages and still keep the energy expended low.

  1. Gaspar Modelo-Howard, Saurabh Bagchi, and Guy Lebanon, “Determining Placement of Intrusion Detectors for a Distributed Application through Bayesian Network Modeling,” Accepted to appear at the 11th International Symposium on Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection (RAID), Boston, MA, September 15-17, 2008. (Acceptance rate: 20/80 = 25%).

This paper presents a technique to determine the choice and placement of intrusion detectors among different services in a distributed system. It is not cost-effective to deploy them everywhere (maintenance, performance costs plus tedium of responding to alerts) and here we provide a Bayesian network-based that will (approximately) optimize the overall quality of detection in the system.

  1. Issa Khalil and Saurabh Bagchi, “MISPAR: Mitigating Stealthy Packet Dropping in Locally-Monitored Multi-hop Wireless Ad Hoc Networks,” Accepted to appear at the 4th International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks (SecureComm), Istanbul, Turkey, September 22-25, 2008. (Acceptance rate: 26/124 = 21%)
  1. This paper presents a class of attacks called stealthy packet dropping in wireless multi-hop networks that no existing technique can detect. This class has the added property that local overhearing based techniques will cause a legitimate node to be accused. We show, how by maintaining a little additional information during route setup, this class of attacks can be detected through local overhearing.
  2. April 14, 2008: My promotion to the position of an Associate Professor with tenure is approved by the highest powers (aka the Board of Trustees) and will take effect from Fall 08. The process has a few different rungs starting with the departmental meeting in early Fall (07), followed within a couple of weeks by the meeting at the College of Engineering level, and then at the University level in mid-Spring (08).
  3. January 4, 2008: I have updated the page with ruminations on my current reads.
  4. July 17, 2007: I have updated the pictures from the recent Scotland trip.
  5. June 28, 2007: I am invited to give a talk at the summer meeting of the IFIP Working Group 10.4 on Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance. It was held near Edinburgh, Scotland. I gave a talk on the security implications of covert timing channels in networked systems (slides).
  6. June 25, 2007: I present our work on security in sleep-wake aware wireless networks at DSN (Dependable Systems and Networks) held in the Edinburgh International Conference Center (slides). I also gave a short talk on data modeling in sensor networks to suppress communication (slides).
  7. June 11, 2007: The second Ph.D. student from DCSL, Gunjan Khanna, defended his thesis. His thesis is titled “Non Intrusive       Detection and Diagnosis of Failures in High Throughput Distributed Systems”. Here are the documents – Abstract, Thesis, and Presentation. Gunjan has gone to work for McKinsey in Pittsburgh.
  8. Mar 15, 2007: Our papers are accepted for DSN and HPDC. The DSN paper is on providing security in multi-hop wireless networks that use sleep-wake scheduling and it was one of 24 papers accepted out of a total of 94 submitted to the PDS track. The HPDC paper is on failure-aware checkpointing in non-dedicated storage systems. The acceptance rate at HPDC was 20%. The conferences will be in June in Edinburgh and Monterey Bay, CA respectively.
  9. Mar 10, 2007: We are starting work on a distributed intrusion detection system for Voice over IP applications under a new contract from Avaya Inc.
  10. Mar 2, 2007: I gave a talk at UT Austin Computer Science on our work on reliability in grid systems. This is joint work with Joanne (Ren) and Prof. Rudi (Eigenmann).
  11. Dec 14, 2006: The first PhD student from our research group, Issa Khalil graduated. His thesis topic was “Mitigation of Control and Data Traffic Attacks in Wireless Ad-Hoc and Sensor Networks”. You can read his thesis here.
  12. Nov 14, 2006: Our paper on sensor network reprogramming gets accepted into Infocom to be held in Anchorage, Alaska in May 2007. The authors are Rajesh Panta and Issa Khalil. 252 out of about 1400 papers were accepted giving an acceptance rate of about 18%. Another paper from our group on diagnosis in distributed systems was accepted as a short paper for Infocom.
  13. Nov 3, 2006: An article on the kinds of forums (conferences and journals) where I publish my research and why I choose these forums.
Last modified: April 21, 2015